haven't been able to get in to any BBC websites for an hour or so - have they been hacked or just a crash?

edit : http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/29/bbc-website-down-offline

no hack, just "technical problems"

Huh.

My Internet didn't work for a bout five minutes. I thought I was hacked!

The fact that it is down is proof it isn't hacked. A down website fails pretty much all reasons one would want to hack a site. DoS attacks are not hacks.

The reasons someone would want to hack a site:

1. To collect/steal information. You want to do this as stealthily as possible. Knocking the web server offline is an instant red alert that'll get everyone looking at the server making it harder to steal the information

2. To plant malware on the website. If the web server is down, then the malware won't be delivered. Once the malware is caught, real sysadmins will put up a message explaining why the site is down to not cause alarm.

3. To deface a website/post a message (for hacker cred or as a form of protest or anything like that). Once again, if the site is down the message cannot be seen and the hacker failed to accomplish the goal.

As mentioned, taking down a site through the likes of a Denial of service attack doesn't involve any hacking, just some specially crafted GET requests.

DEFRON is just being silly, of course it's down because of a huge DDoS attack from Anonymous. There is no other logical explanation.

Skynet is online!!!!

Maybe it uses Cloudflare

Edit: I actually laughed.

I like reading about my personnal acts in the news without my consent as it amuses others....

I am not sure how easy it would be to do a DDOS attack on the BBC given that the website can cope with more than 10 - 15million users (not page views, users) a day.

Gotta love those forum censors

After 3 years on The Misc BBC means something else entirely to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_%28satellite%29, it's what the British Army uses to communicate.

Anyway, just because a website's down, it doesn't preclude it from being hacked: it'd be quite normal to take it down for any clean-up that's necessary. Whether or not a holding page is put in place is up to the site admins.

I can't understand why anybody visits the BBC news site. The state broadcaster! They're bound to be impartial!

Their lack of impartiality does bother me, but given their often antagonistic approach to things, I think it's not so much them being the "state" broadcaster as much as it's down to a serious lack of accountability.

Hmm, you guys must get something different. The morning BBC news here (Noon for you at that time) is fairly lacking in hostility IMO, the only times they seem hostile is in situations like the Syrian Conflict atm.

They have their favourite subjects that they'll either relentlessly denigrate or unquestioningly champion. Not everything, but enough to irritate after a while, even on the odd occasion that it's something I ostensibly agree with. Admittedly they could be a lot worse, but they often don't match up to their own claims of impartiality and their retort that "being criticised by everyone proves we're impartial!" using carefully selected criticisms only serves to irritate further...

I actually find myself preferentially watching CNN as they're less aggressive and miserable than BBC news.

Generally speaking, DDoS attacks also use specially crafted request packets to take down a web server. It's rare for you to be able to outbandwidth a DDoS

http://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_22.html

The vulnerability fixed in 2.2.19 being a common one abused right now:

A flaw was found in the apr_fnmatch() function of the bundled APR library. Where mod_autoindex is enabled, and a directory indexed by mod_autoindex contained files with sufficiently long names, a remote attacker could send a carefully crafted request which would cause excessive CPU usage. This could be used in a denial of service attack.

Notice how this one is CPU-based, not bandwidth based. It's a prime candidate for DDoSing, since you may still need a large group to overwhelm the server, but it has nothing to do with bandwidth.

Then of course other DoS methods also don't use bandwidth-based attacks to take down a site.

Well, they're back up this morning - didn't see any mention of last nights down time

Looks like it was hacked
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/bbc-suffers-sophisticated-iranian-cyber-attack/3448?tag=nl.e539

Blocking/jamming signals is not hacking

Neither is cracking, but I think colloquially-speaking, it's not an entirely unreasonable description; it seems rather pedantic to say otherwise.

Was this quoting me intentionally? I didn't mention anything about bandwidth, I just implied that the BBC had a huge amount of resources and a well designed server network (with the number of physical servers in the thousands) and do could probably handle a DDOS attack fairly well.

I actually thought you were the OP and could've sworn you said something about bandwidth. That's what I get for posting before having my morning cup

Though in my defense all you non-avatar people look the same

The beeb is positively saintly compared to the likes of fox news.

Indeedy pants.